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I feel bad about composing 2 min songs...

sIR dORT

sIR dORT

Senior Member
Should I? I think it's knowing that classical composers of the earlier eras could create compositions of much longer length that does it for me. I compose just for myself (at least for right now), and just wondered if I should try and compose longer pieces or be content with writing a two minute song as long as it has good content.
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I've been at this for a few months and I'm still hovering around the 1min - 3 min song area. I usually just write little tid bits with new knowledge or skills i've picked up. I felt the same way at first. I was under this self imposed pressure of extending these pieces just because and it really only lead to needlessly extended pieces. Write what suits you and what makes you happy (at least for know, as you put it). Once you do it for pay, you'll write what is requested from you, but for now enjoy your creations no matter the time. I recently wrote a 1 min piece for my youngest daughter and she loved it. Just write. Soon i hope to implement some formal structure into my writing and then my pieces might evolve into longer more cohesive works. Best of luck!
 
Well, my first piece that didn't involve using AI to write was probably about a minute. It had a nice (okay, my opinion, it was probably barely okay) oboe solo. So I copied the whole thing, but changed all the instruments so the solo was now a cello and the string background instruments were now woodwinds. Then I said, oh it's still too short. So I copied it again changing the instruments to brass/horns and changing the solo to violin (changed the octave), thought it was too boring for the violin and moved notes around.

I have no idea how good it is and I'm a little afraid to share it. but I enjoy listening to it.
 
There's a lot to be said for creating, developing and then distilling an idea into a 2-3 minute track. Some of my favourite pieces of music are this length. I'm not just referring to pop/rock songs - check out some of Craig Armstrong's tunes from 'Piano Works'. Beautifully written instrumental themes which say what they need to say, and then leave - often in 2 minutes or less.

So many times I'll listen to a 5-6 minute track and after a while it just becomes repetitive and it's like "OK - I get it". Sometimes all the track needs is for you to state your theme/idea and not over-stay your welcome!
 
Listen to Beethoven's 5th. He's starting with this BababaBaaaaa and it's more or less all he uses to build a long track. Actually you don't need much to stell a story. When you have a motive you can do creative things with it. Repeat it, repeat it on different steps, transpose it, stretch it, shrink it, turn it upside down, reverse it, give it to different ranges, use it as bass figure, play it on different modes, make it big, reduce it, use ornaments, use fragments, make it a question or an answer, use it as one part of a dialogue, make it a part of a larger structure, harmonize it, reharmonize it, make it consonant, make it dissonant... and at that point you didn't even start to orchestrate.
It's a bit like jokes. Many jokes belong into categories. Lonely man on a small one palm island jokes. Boss & employee jokes. Cheating dad and smart children jokes. Woman at the doctor jokes. Car driver and police man jokes. Endless list of well known cliches. But the fun is to get something unexpected out of those well known situations. Use your ideas as a starting point.

Beside that it isn't wrong to write short tracks. But if you want to write longer tracks it's good to look how others did it. It's not a miracle.
 
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Short songs are fine, but for your own sake you should try to expand your comfort zone. Do what Saxer wrote, turn your theme into as many variations as possible. Some ideas will work better than others, but nobody has to hear this except you. Just try different things. Let your ideas lead you to different places that you wouldn't have found on your own.
 
Think yourself lucky - 2 mins is an age! I've been stuck mainly writing 30 second theme tunes for the past year or so!
 
dzilizzi said:
I have no idea how good it is and I'm a little afraid to share it. but I enjoy listening to it.
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Share it! Dare to suck!

Sometimes when I think I should write longer/more complex/more adult/more classical/more contrapuntal/ more whatever music I end up just getting overwhelmed and write nothing, or what I do write is very bland and I chuck it. But when I focus on making 1 bar or 4 bars or 8 bars sound as good as I can it usually leads me somewhere that I'm more satisfied with, regardless of length. Often I just throw in some markers and figure out what I want to the structure to be, then I populate each section with some synth/sound design or percussion elements before I actually get into harmony, and God-willing, counterpoint. Everyone's "way in" is different, but for me the production and the way things sounds is important and also inspiring, so spending time on that first can help me sneak up on the actual notes.
 
I don't like long pieces. It's a kind of masturbation. Nobody wants to hear that. I wouldn't expect folks to sit through +30 minutes of something I noodled out, and I most certainly wouldn't feel bad for not doing it, or perhaps struggling to do it. Even most symphonies are burdened with meandering nonsense that should have been left out for the benefit of everyone.

I love it when a strong musical statement is elegantly distilled into 2-4 minutes of music. That's a thing of beauty. Writing like that also really forces you to listen carefully, waste no time, work everything out in detail, eliminate anything that's half-baked and sub par and get to the point. I think it has more value than "oh from here I can modulate on for 15 minutes".
 
Jimmy Hellfire said:
I don't like long pieces. It's a kind of masturbation. Nobody wants to hear that. I wouldn't expect folks to sit through +30 minutes of something I noodled out, and I most certainly wouldn't feel bad for not doing it, or perhaps struggling to do it. Even most symphonies are burdened with meandering nonsense that should have been left out for the benefit of everyone.

I love it when a strong musical statement is elegantly distilled into 2-4 minutes of music. That's a thing of beauty. Writing like that also really forces you to listen carefully, waste no time, work everything out in detail, eliminate anything that's half-baked and sub par and get to the point. I think it has more value than "oh from here I can modulate on for 15 minutes".
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I think it's safe to say Mahler is the exception?
 
Jimmy Hellfire said:
I don't like long pieces. It's a kind of masturbation. Nobody wants to hear that. I wouldn't expect folks to sit through +30 minutes of something I noodled out,
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Well I for one certainly enjoyed Beethoven's Wankfest in C minor the other day and as for Mahler, he must've had a strong prescription for his glasses and yet boy, what climaxes.
Your right Jimmy I probably wouldn't sit through 30 mins of anyone's noodling, but 30 mins of music written by a master?
 
If your goal is to write longer pieces, I'd suggest thinking a lot about the large-scale form of the piece and about how you'll introduce, develop, and repeat your musical materials before you even start writing. If you're able to get the big-picture stuff out of the way first, the process of writing the actual notes becomes more and more like following a script to fill in the blanks between key points and less like creation ex nihilo. And I find that approaching things this way makes it much easier to write long stretches of music that hang together properly.

Before I start a piece, I like to actually construct a timeline with verbal descriptions of what will be happening in the piece at any given clock time (usually in increments of 5 to 45 seconds). At this point, I'm basically dealing with the rhythm of the piece's overall pacing so that during any point of the actual note writing process, I know where I'm headed and when I'm supposed to get there. I also usually try to come up with the major themes and their variants, orchestration paradigms, large-scale harmonic shifts, and general harmonic language at this point. I find the less I have to think about these things when I'm actually writing the piece, the better.

The ideal is that the piece should already basically exist before you even start writing it down, because once you start putting notes down, it becomes much more difficult to make large-scale creative changes without having to do a lot of rewriting. Best to be comfortable with these large-scale decisions up front, because then you won't have to second guess them later.
 
Saxer said:
Listen to Beethoven's 5th. He's starting with this BababaBaaaaa and it's more or less all he uses to build a long track. Actually you don't need much to stell a story. When you have a motive you can do creative things with it. Repeat it, repeat it on different steps, transpose it, stretch it, shrink it, turn it upside down, reverse it, give it to different ranges, use it as bass figure, play it on different modes, make it big, reduce it, use ornaments, use fragments, make it a question or an answer, use it as one part of a dialogue, make it a part of a larger structure, harmonize it, reharmonize it, make it consonant, make it dissonant... and at that point you didn't even start to orchestrate.
It's a bit like jokes. Many jokes belong into categories. Lonely man on a small one palm island jokes. Boss & employee jokes. Cheating dad and smart children jokes. Woman at the doctor jokes. Car driver and police man jokes. Endless list of well known cliches. But the fun is to get something unexpected out of those well known situations. Use your ideas as a starting point.

Beside that it isn't wrong to write short tracks. But if you want to write longer tracks it's good to look how others did it. It's not a miracle.
Click to expand...
So what's the balance then between variating a theme and overkilling it? CGR made this point and I agree, but at the same time, I think you can repeat a theme several times/ways and not bore the listener, so how do you know it's been enough?
 
sIR dORT said:
So what's the balance then between variating a theme and overkilling it?
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There's Star Trek the Motion Picture (done oh so right). The fact that it's SUCH a great theme doesn't hurt (not to mention there are several other knockout themes in that score that have little to do with the main musically, at least until they are wonderfully worked in later in the score) BUT....

check out Damien: Omen II where Goldsmith took the amazing, famous chorale from the first and basically pounded it into the ground (and not always in interesting variations). He never wrote this cannibalistically or as belaboriously before or since...and I've always wondered if he himself was aware of this beating-a-dead-horse anomaly in his repetoire.

But before I get too crazy, allow me to proclaim I love Jerry's music so much, and thought Omen II was overall scary fun both as a movie and score.
 
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sIR dORT said:
So what's the balance then between variating a theme and overkilling it? CGR made this point and I agree, but at the same time, I think you can repeat a theme several times/ways and not bore the listener, so how do you know it's been enough?
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Try to not just think in terms of straight recapitulation but rather deconstruction. My composition professor from my college says said that if we were stuck, try writing the main expository section or climax and work backwards. Listening to Shostakovich's 11th Symphony these last few days, it's clear he was able to work up to his main material by teasing and hinting at the exposition. He stretched out the piece by using elements of his thematic material. Not surprising, much of his symphonies come off as tone poems even though they do adhere to symphonic structure.
 
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